Having enjoyed Fredenberger’s The Newly Weds, The Dissidents, and Lucky Girls, I was quite sure her latest, The Limits, would also be good reading, and I was not disappointed. The Limits is set in the time of the lockdowns in the COVID-19 pandemic, in both Tahiti and New York. Tahiti, because Nathalie, a French marine biologist lives and works there, researching corals. Pia, her fifteen-year-old daughter, is sent from Tahiti to join her father, Stephen, who is now divorced from Nathalie and remarried to Kate.
Stephen is a cardiologist, and working very long hours in the pandemic. Kate teaches high school, and so is remote-working. They live in a luxury apartment in Manhattan, called The Laureate.
“Since she married Stephen, she was rich by anyone’s standards. The first time her sister had seen the apartment, she’d drawn in a breath. […] Her sister had recognized the difference between her own suburban comfort and the objects in Stephen’s apartment, the art work and the hush in the lobby downstairs” (p10-11)
Stephen’s father was an attorney and his mother was an ob-gyn; clearly he and Kate are from different socio-economic backgrounds.
Pia is sent back to Manhattan because her expensive school there is hybrid and so partly can be attended in person, which her parents think is good for her. Pia was reluctant to come because she has a crush on Raffi, a research assistance or enabler in Tahiti, whom Pia first met as a 5 year old. With the pandemic intensifying, and Kate pregnant, Stephen decides to live in an Air BnB near the hospital to avoid putting Kate and Pia at risk; which of course intensifies the tension for Kate and Pia, left in the Laureate and with each other.
Although divorced, Nathalie and Stephen write long e-mails to each other about their lives, not just about their daughter.
“They had a history of written communication. Six months after they were married, she’d left to do postdoctoral research on Rangiroa, […] now they were divorced and separated by more than six thousand miles – they were writing to each other again” (p31-32)
Stephen likes everything to be aboveboard, even asking Kate to remain in the room when he is on the phone with Nathalie, but he doesn’t mention this written communication,
“their pen pal relationship. The letters were in fact written by different people, younger people who expressed themselves only in that form. Otherwise, he thought, it was as if those people no longer existed” (p36)
Freudenberger has a lovely way of revealing/explaining motives and people’s unacknowledged feelings or agendas, nuanced and understanding. And although Stephen wants everything to be open and above board,
“He would have liked to keep the two women entirely separate in his mind” (p36)
which shows the kind of mind Stephen has, and his liking for compartmentalisation as a coping mechanism. He does this again when he comes back from the hospital mentally distraught at having lost a patient, and although he realises Kate has something important to communicate, he puts her on hold until he has changed and washed, again, compartmentalising his life and thoughts. Freudenberger’s showing rather than telling works extremely effectively.
There are tensions when Pia comes to live with Stephen and Kate, especially as Kate is now pregnant. But the tensions are not too cliched, not just a teenager acting out to reject a stepmother. Kate is trying hard to be accepted by Pia, but she has a lot of experience in her worklife with teenagers, and has a general sense of where to tread and where not to tread. That said, Pia is a prickly adolescent, pretty much self-absorbed, insolent and manipulative in turns. But Pia is not consistently taciturn; it is often hard to figure this character out, as her motives and feelings are left unclear to the reader, despite the fact we ‘hear’ her thoughts through journal she keeps.
Through the novel, there is some suspense and mystery to do with Raffi. He is breaking the rules of the research institute, stealing stuff, not accounting for his use of equipment, and it is unclear for most of the novel what he is up to, except it seems obvious Pia is set on aiding and abetting whatever it is.
There is also a parallel story unfolding in the novel, which for a long while does not seem connected with the main story – a story with Athyna as protagonist. Athyna is a student of Kate’s, who lives with her mum and older sister, Breeanna, and Breeanna’s 5 year old son, Marcus, whom Athyna has to babysit often. However, the problem is Breeanna’s boyfriend and father of Marcus, Elijah, who does not have a job and lives with Athyna’s family, a presence which Athyna does not like. Only near the end of the story do Pia and Athyna hook up, and the stories dovetail at last. But for most part, they seem to just run on parallel tracks. When it is revealed how the stories dovetail, it seems so superficially that the entire Athyna-story doesn’t seem to justify its inclusion.
Overall, it is very far from a perfect novel. The set up was so full of potential, but so many possible fascinating angles go undiscussed. Pia, particularly, comes across as unconvincing, and if there is a central protagonist, it is Pia. Not the best of strategies. The ending is unsatisfactory, anticlimactic, fizzles out, in fact. None of the telling is uninteresting, but the weaving together of characters and narratives is not tight enough, and much is left unconclusive and headed nowhere – such as Pia’s relationship with Kate, for example, so central to the novel, is left undeveloped. There are a lot of side characters, who could have been interesting, such as Frances, Stephen’s indomitable mother, but this also is left under-developed and goes nowhere in the end. Overall, not one of Freudenberger’s strongest pieces. Still though, her writing style is good enough to remain quite engaging, even if the characters this time all seem a tad contrived.
(For another take on this book, see Susan’s review)
The Limits
Nell Freudenberger
Penguin Random House, 2024.
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